INTRODUCTION
For the last 6 months KOBAKANT have been running KOBA, a tailorshop for electronic textiles and wearable technology in Berlin, Germany.
The KOBA School of Wickedfabrics is intended as a time and place for us to formalize our tailoring process and share this experiance with you.

This booklet was made to accompany the TAILORING week school –
intended for professionals from diverse backgrounds who want to learn to develop e-textile garments from scratch to fitting.
By teaching a school for tailor-made wearable technology we hope to inspire you that different ways of producing technology are possible and tailoring is one of these paths to electronic diversity.

SENSE YOURSELF MOVING
In order to go through the process of tailoring an e-textile garment from start to finish, we’ve prepared an example: each participant will tailor a simple blouse or jacket with 1-2 inputs (textile sensors) and 1-2 outputs (vibration motors). The textile sensor will capture a physical movement of the body and the vibration motor will respond to this movement and feed information back to you.

This may sound too simple, but trust us, e-textiles take time and to construct a garment, a sensor, a motor module and a custom circuit that connects them all takes a lot of time.

TEXTILE SENSORS

Q: how to know the “perfect” pull-up resistor?
A: graph curve of different resistors and make choice.

Q: how to read a sensor matrix?
A: the i/o (in/out) pins of the arduino can be changed during the loop. start by manually coding these changes to read and write to the rows and columns of your matrix. then try implementing the for() loop.
here some example code for reading a 2 x 2 matrix:

MICROCONTROLLER PROGRAMMING

flora
pull-up resistor
voltage divider
transistor switch

on wednesday we will be programming the Flora using the Arduino IDE programming environment. if you don’t already have it, please download the Arduino software for your computer from this link:
>> https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

if you want to get a head start on installing the Adafruit boards package, you can open the Arduino IDE and follow the following steps. otherwise we will also go over this together during the school:
>> https://learn.adafruit.com/add-boards-arduino-v164/setup

Q: #define x y VS int x = y?
A: #define ledPIN 2 is just a fancy way of setting up a “search and replace” in your code. Wherever “ledPIN” appears, the arduino compiler pretends it saw a “2” instead. It can’t be changed while the sketch is running, and it takes no memory in the processor.

int ledPIN = 2; is a variable. It takes a little memory (two bytes) to store the value, and in fact it takes a little more memory to store the original value you started with. However, this allows the sketch to modify that variable under any desired circumstances, and thus use the new value from that time on.